Enterprise Commerce Blog

15 Ecommerce Resolutions for 2015: Part 1

To kick off the new year, we’ve got a 3-part series covering the 15 ecommerce resolutions for 2015 you need to make. Today’s post covers 1-5. Dig in!

1. Tune your performance

It’s no secret that as websites add more cool features, pages get bigger and thus, get slower. Radware observes top ecommerce sites are 21% slower than a year ago (50% taking longer than 10s to load!), with “leaders” slower than the rest of the pack.

Tammy Everts from Radware shares a step-by-step method on how to calculate both the short and long term losses from slow page loads and downtime. This may serve as a wake up call for the importance of performance!

2. Google disclosed, after much testing, it now uses https as a ranking signal. Though it’s not a silver bullet, it can have a negative impact on SEO if not implemented correctly. Search Engine Land has the tips you need to do it right.

3. Google’s never-ending crackdown on spammy links made waves again, notably with Penguin 3 (the original Penguin update dates back to 2012). Marketers should be aware that excessive use of anchor text (especially when the text matches the page’s title tag keywords), use of paid links and even guest blogging are factors in spam detection. If you’ve used these tactics, or even been victim of negative SEO (a competitor buying links on your behalf, etc), you can make effort to get these links removed (contact webmasters and request removal) and use a disavow file to tell Google you don’t endorse these backlinks.

If you’re not involved directly with your site’s SEO, ensure your internal team, contractors or agencies understand the update, have an action plan, and do not use these tactics in link building going forward, though they may have been “safe” or effective at one time.

Matt Cutts himself says of guest blogging: “Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way any more.”

4. Local searches are important for omnichannel businesses, and 2014’s Pigeon update was all about local search. Traditional web search ranking signals in local search, meaning factors like page relevance, authority, links, social signals, etc affect local search more than ever. Google also tweaked local signals like distance and location.

Ecommerce sites may be impacted by the ranking boost given to directory/community sites like Yelp for generic terms. Practical Ecommerce has a great article on how to detect if Pigeon pecked your position and how to recover, including optimizing your store locator and Google+ location pages.

5. Google Authorship markuphas been discontinued, thus does nothing for you (of less impact to ecommerce marketers but may affect your content marketing programs). It won’t hurt you to keep the markup (other than a bit of code bloat), but no need to use it going forward.

4. If you need help with your structured data markup, use the Structured Data Markup Helper to tag data fields for products and more.

5. Use the Sitemaps tool to identify problems with indexing.

Beyond the basics, use GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) to view keyword referral data. Now that this data is no longer passed to your analytics tools, the GWT reports are essential. A detailed post on how to analyze and apply this insight is found at Search Engine Watch.

3. Audit your analytics

If you are not confident in your in-house team’s judo chops to perform an audit, you can use a consulting firm to audit your analytics. An analytics audit checks your general implementation to ensure all pages and events are properly tracked with the appropriate tags, dashboards are collecting the right data, account filters are doing what they promise to report (pulling the right data), micro and macro conversions are properly tracked, campaigns are properly tracked, search-not-provided workarounds are in place and perhaps most importantly, mobile tracking is properly implemented.

Even if you’ve had an audit done before, it’s worth a check up, especially if any changes were made during the year, and if other services consume your analytics data, such as personalization tools or CRM.

If campaign strategies and investment changed in 2014, or you’ve learned more about the effectiveness of various touches, it may also be time to revisit your attribution model (the credit you give to various touches like email, affiliate, PPC, social and remarketing for conversions).

4. Audit your SEM

One of the biggest changes to Google Adwords this year was the removal of the exact match type. While this change was applied several months ago, it’s critical to continue to add negative keywords to prevent ads from appearing for broader keyword searches that either are irrelevant, or convert poorly on an ongoing basis.

As usual, ensure your sold-out and permanently discontinued products are removed from your campaigns, along with their relevant keywords, unless you have a strategy for bidding and offering a comparable substitute which, as George Michie from RKG Group shares can be a profitable tactic.

RKG Group has a tool for its clients that also removes unprofitable products from a campaign when “inventory becomes thin in ways that impact conversion rates, e.g.: “we still have men’s swimsuits but only for waist sizes less than 24? and greater than 52?.”

If your internal or outsourced search management team isn’t communicating regularly with the merchandising and sales teams, resolve to ensure commuincation around new and discontinued products exist.

5. Refine your site search

If have the basics covered, try these advanced moves with 4 ways to make site search more contextual: include contextual snippets, intelligently serve grid/list view based on query, personalize default search scope, and dynamically match product attributes to query.